Her career, as a White House correspondent, entailed hard-hitting journalism and the aggressive questioning of every U.S. President from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Barack Obama. Her service as part of the White House press corps began in January 1961 and abruptly ended in June 2010 when the reporter with an Arab-American background dared touch what has become a third rail in American politics, charging that Israel should "get the hell out of Palestine", a comment which she said she came to "deeply regret". Thomas was a trail blazer for both women and White House journalists as "the first female officer of the National Press Club, the first female member and president of the White House Correspondents' Association, and the first female member of the Gridiron Club."

So I am out of my expertise here when I ask a naive but honest question. What is the big deal about Helen Thomas? Every time I ever saw her ask a president a question at a news conference it was some kind of softball, almost never challenging. I was always disappointed. I do not remember her as hard-hitting at all, but as someone who asked questions guaranteed to be safe enough that she would keep her position for many decades. OK, she was the first female in several prominent roles, and I greatly respect that. But I can name dozens of other journalists, including you, Brad, whom I would much rather have had in that White House correspondent role. What am I missing?

You're missing the fact that she got in the faces of those in power on a regular basis. That's why she lost her seat for a time in the front row. They didn't want to deal with her(though I think Kennedy liked her). They couldn't control her. She thought it was a journalist's job to NOT be cozy with those in power but to hold their feet to the fire.

She got a really raw deal by telling the TRUTH about the Israeli-Palestinian situation. The damn Zionist land thieves should get out of ALL of Palestine. But you can't be someone respectable in this country and tell the truth about Israel, a "state" we never should have supported the establishment of.

Grrrr 1 @5 provided such an excellent example that rebuts David Jefferson's suggestion @2 that Helen Thomas only offered up soft-ball questions, that I felt it appropriate to embed the video with this comment:

Does this question to the dissembler-in-chief, George W. Bush, sound like a "softball question" to you, Dr. Jefferson?

THOMAS: Your decisions to invade Iraq has caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis…Every reason you’ve given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true. My question is: Why did you really want to go to war? From the moment you stepped into the White House…What was your real reason? You have said it wasn’t oil...It hasn’t been Israel or anything else. What was it?

The power of Thomas' question was embodied in the stumbling, mumbling response in which Bush not only weakly denied that he had intended to invade Iraq from the moment he assumed office, but in which he attempted to conflate the invasion of Iraq with 9/11 as he comically sought to justify invading Iraq because “the Taliban trained al Qaeda.”

By asking that question, Thomas exposed Bush's perfidy for all to see

BTW, Dr. Jefferson. It was I, not Brad Friedman, who authored this piece.

Although some of her remarks seem to suggest, as genedebs @4 did, that Helen Thomas was saying that the Israelis should abandon that territory that exists within the borders of what has been internationally recognized as the sovereign state of Israel since 1948, her subsequent expression of regret suggests that, when Thomas said that the Israelis should "get the hell out of Palestine," she was referring to the territories that Israel has occupied since the 1967 Six Day War.

Indeed, even during her initial remarks, Thomas said: "Remember, these people are occupied and it's their land."

Likewise, it is those "occupied territories" --- as opposed to Israel proper --- that former President Carter had in mind as being the location of what he says has become an apartheid state --- colonial Palestinian territories that are being occupied by Israelis within walled-off enclaves, often described as "settlements."